


acolyte

by catalysis



Series: devoted [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Kinda, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, POV Second Person, Red String of Fate, lee's qpr kagehina agenda, pt. 2!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26679127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catalysis/pseuds/catalysis
Summary: you’ll hold the sun itself one day, you claim.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Series: devoted [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1941310
Comments: 16
Kudos: 69





	acolyte

**Author's Note:**

> i love the red thread of fate mythos but not the romance. the thread i write about here is **NOT inherently romantic**.  
> warning for jealousy. (there is NO infidelity.)

You are born with a string tying you to your brother. You already share a face, but the thread between you two confirms that you'll never be separate. You try dying your hair to distinguish yourself but it ends up the same color as the thread around your pinky. You will never be different.

So you try something else. You become Apollo incarnate. Passionate, dramatic, selfish. You’ll hold the sun itself one day, you claim. You say this until you meet a boy built of sunshine in your second year of high school. This boy, this sun, reminds you that he will not be tamed so easily. The sky is not your domain today. It belongs to the sun and his flock of crows. The boy is the sun and you are not worthy. You are not allowed to do more than burn your hands on the flame of him. Not yet, at least.

In your third year, you build your team up, you build yourself up, and you hope that you’ll get the chance to prove yourself.

You do. You see him again and he is still the sun. Still surrounded by his crows. They hold him aloft; the team an image of Icarus redeemed.

Your hands reach higher this year and you think you manage to grasp him. You reach the sun; you touch it, even if it’s just for a moment. But afterwards, all you have to show for it are fingertips scalded red and raw by hot wax.

You’ve proven yourself worthy, but it doesn’t actually matter. The burning you can see in his gaze will scorch away any flimsy memory he keeps of you. He’ll have his wings reshaped by his sharp-eyed setter and not think of you and that stupid promise you made him.

You graduate and the string around your finger becomes a heavy chain. For the first time, you test its slack. There’s something bitter in the way you find no resistance. You wished so hard for separation, but now that you have it, you realize that it’s not quite to your taste.

It takes you time, but you learn how to stop looking over your shoulder for your face mirrored back at you. You learn how to set for people you don’t quite trust yet. You learn how to stand on the court by yourself. 

You learn all of these things only to unlearn them when you meet the sun again.

When you see the sun again, your divinity is stripped away from you and you are just another planet pulled into orbit. You want to set for him so badly that your hands shake. You think that maybe you misremembered his radiance. That maybe once you set for him, the need will be satisfied, the promise fulfilled, and he’ll be just another monster on your team.

You are so, so wrong. You set for him once and you learn what it really means to touch the sun. 

But then he takes your outstretched hands and turns you away from him to face the rest of the team. He shows you that you don’t have to stand on your own. That you never have. The sunshine warm at your back is almost enough to remind you of Inarizaki. Almost; not quite; maybe soon. Maybe.

It’s sometime after this that you realize basking in his glow isn’t enough for you. You want it magnifying-lens focused on you. You want to be set alight by it. You watch his tongue curl around the syllables of your name and it makes you thirst for a single taste of him.

So you reach, and reach, and reach. And one day, he reaches back. Neither of you ever do things by halves, so he takes both of your hands again, but this time he holds them for himself.

He is laughter and glamour and color and you fall in love with all of it. You wonder what he sees in you.

The day you find out that his high school setter is also his soulmate, it nearly breaks you. You’re on the brink of tears and the edge of destruction because how could you ever compare to that? You know for a fact that you’ll never be able to make yourself desirable enough to compete for the hunger in your sun’s gaze when he stares at his soulmate.

When the time comes for them to stand across the net from each other, you are filled with nothing but dread. He offers you love, but what is that compared to the devotion he sings to his Daedalus?

You send him set after set, more than you should, probably, but he doesn’t even look at you. That wicked, hungry gaze is fixed on someone who is decidedly not you. Someone who you will never, ever emerge from the shadow of.

You make it to the Olympics, but it’s more bitter than it is sweet. Benchwarmer. Second-string. Second place. How does it feel to be a silver medal to his soulmate's gold? You’re once again silver to someone else’s gold. It’s a reminder you thought you’d outgrown by now. You haven’t though, and maybe you never will.

The sun will destroy you if you let him. He'll burn and scorch and turn you right into ash. The ash, you imagine, will be gray, and isn't it strange that the reminders just keep coming?

But in the end, he doesn’t burn you. No. You burn yourself with the sheer intensity of your desire.

He is laughter. He is glamour. He is color. Without him, the monochrome, the _gray_ , threatens to consume you. He doesn’t burn you. But you wish he had, so that the gray wouldn’t be your own fault.

You are here and he is somewhere that is not. He sends you photos. They aren’t enough. How could they be when you’ve grown used to the real thing? Hearing your name through a tinny phone can never compare to the curve of his lips around the angles of it. Through the screen of your laptop, he looks so flat, nothing at all like the solid shape you are familiar with.

You miss the warmth of his skin against yours, the weight of him in your lap, the taste of him on your tongue. He tasted like summer, all humid heat and cleansing rain. You wonder what he tastes of now. You wonder if you linger on his palate like he does on yours.

Hyogo has always been your home, will always be, you think, but sometimes you wish it wasn’t. Half of your soul is in Hyogo but half of your heart is 19000 kilometers away.

* * *

_Are ya happy?_ your brother asks and what can you say? _Yes_ and you’re a liar. _No_ and you’re second place in a two-person competition.

 _I will be_ you claim with all the conviction you know he’s always seen right through. You will be. You have to be.

* * *

When he comes home for the holidays, he’s closer, but still not close enough. You last three whole days in your childhood home before you find yourself making the five-hour trip to Miyagi.

When he sees you standing on his front porch, there’s a second where he says nothing. And you wonder if he’ll turn away and forget you like you know he can. You wonder if he has already.

 _Did ya miss me?_ you ask, but it’s less a question and more a prayer. 

_No._ he says and you take in a sharp, hopeless breath. He steps closer. _How could I?_ He grabs your hand and presses it against his chest; the steady thump of his heart warms your palm. _How could I miss you when you’re right here?_

It turns out that the boy you hold isn’t quite the sun in the way you’d coveted. But he’ll reach for it with you.

**Author's Note:**

> the absolute struggle i had with writing smth in 2nd person pov with no names.  
> let's be friends on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nyamayachi) :)


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